In his commentary to Shade’s poem, Kinbote (in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions Arnor's poem about a miragarl ("mirage girl"):
Our Prince was fond of Fleur as of a sister but with no soft shadow of incest or secondary homosexual complications. She had a small pale face with prominent cheekbones, luminous eyes, and curly dark hair. It was rumored that after going about with a porcelain cup and Cinderella's slipper for months, the society sculptor and poet Arnor had found in her what he sought and had used her breasts and feet for his Lilith Calling Back Adam; but I am certainly no expert in these tender matters. Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled. Her fragile ankles, he said, which she placed very close together in her dainty and wavy walk, were the "careful jewels" in Arnor's poem about a miragarl ("mirage girl"), for which "a dream king in the sandy wastes of time would give three hundred camels and three fountains."
On ságaren werém tremkín tri stána
Verbálala wod gév ut trí phantána
(I have marked the stress accents).
The Prince did not heed this rather kitschy prattle (all, probably, directed by her mother) and, let it be repeated, regarded her merely as a sibling, fragrant and fashionable, with a painted pout and a maussade, blurry, Gallic way of expressing the little she wished to express. Her unruffled rudeness toward the nervous and garrulous Countess amused him. He liked dancing with her - and only with her. He hardly squirmed at all when she stroked his hand or applied herself soundlessly with open lips to his cheek which the haggard after-the-ball dawn had already sooted. She did not seem to mind when he abandoned her for manlier pleasures; and she met him again in the dark of a car or in the half-glow of a cabaret with the subdued and ambiguous smile of a kissing cousin. (note to Line 80)
The society sculptor and poet Arnor brings to mind Nora Gal (born Eleonora Galperin, 1912-1991), the author of the first Russian translation (Malen'kiy prints, 1959) of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's fairy tale Le Petit Prince ("The Little Prince," 1943). Nora Gal makes one think of Galatea, in Greek and Roman mythology, the post-classical name given to the ivory or marble statue carved by the sculptor Pygmalion of Cyprus, which was brought to life by Aphrodite (Venus) after Pygmalion fell in love with it. Pygmalion (1912) is a play by Bernard Shaw (an Irish playwright, 1856-1950). Its protagonist, Eliza Doolittle is a Cockney flowerseller. A miragarl (mirage girl) makes one think of Zolotoy mirazh ("Golden Mirage," 1956), a Russian version (by Nora Gal) of Theodore Dreiser's story Phantom Gold (1927). Zolotoy osyol is the Russian title of Apuleus' novel Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass); Zolotoy telyonok ("The Little Golden Calf," 1931) is a novel by those joint authors of genius (as Shade calls them) Ilf and Petrov. Judge Goldsworth (whose wife resembles Malenkov, a statesman who in March 1953 briefly succeeded Stalin as the leader of the Soviet Union) is Kinbote's landlord. In Canto One of his poem Shade describes his house in New Wye (a small University town in New England) and mentions the phantom of his little daughter's swing:
I had a favorite young shagbark there
With ample dark jade leaves and a black, spare,
Vermiculated trunk. The setting sun
Bronzed the black bark, around which, like undone
Garlands, the shadows of the foliage fell.
It is now stout and rough; it has done well.
White butterflies turn lavender as they
Pass through its shade where gently seems to sway
The phantom of my little daughter's swing. (ll. 49-57)
The Russian word for both "swing" and "seesaw" is kacheli. In VN's first novel Mashen'ka ("Mary," 1926) Alfyorov (Mashen'ka's husband, the mathematician) compares chisla (numbers) to kacheli (trapeze):
-- Вы не математик, Антон Сергеич, -- суетливо продолжал Алферов.-- А я на числах, как на качелях, всю жизнь прокачался. Бывало, говорил жене: раз я математик, ты мать-и-мачеха.
Горноцветов и Колин залились тонким смехом. Госпожа Дорн вздрогнула, испуганно посмотрела на обоих.
-- Одним словом: цифра и цветок,-- холодно сказал Ганин.
Только Клара улыбнулась. Ганин стал наливать себе воды, все смотрели на его движенье.
-- Да, вы правы, нежнейший цветок,-- протяжно сказал Алфёров, окинув соседа своим блестящим, рассеянным взглядом. -- Прямо чудо, как она пережила эти годы ужаса. Я вот уверен, что она приедет сюда цветущая, веселая... Вы -- поэт, Антон Сергеевич, опишите-ка такую штуку,-- как женственность, прекрасная русская женственность, сильнее всякой революции, переживает все,-- невзгоды, террор...
‘You’re not a mathematician, Anton Sergeyevich,’ Alfyorov went on fussily, ‘but I’ve been swinging on that trapeze all my life. I once used to say to my wife that if I’m a “summer” you’re surely a spring cinquefoil —’
Gornotsvetov and Kolin dissolved in mannered mirth. Frau Dorn gave a start and looked at them both in fright.
‘In short, a flower and a figure,’ said Ganin drily. Only Klara smiled. Ganin started pouring himself some water, his action watched by all the others.
‘Yes, you’re right, a most fragile flower,’ drawled Alfyorov, turning his bright, vacant look onto his neighbor. ‘It’s an absolute miracle how she survived those seven years of horror. And I’m sure that when she arrives she’ll be gay and blooming. You’re a poet, Anton Sergeyevich; you ought to write something about it — about how womanhood, lovely Russian womanhood, is stronger than any revolution and can survive it all — adversity, terror —’ (Chapter II)
Aleksey Ivanovich Alfyorov (whom we also meet, in the company of his charming wife, in VN's novel The Luzhin Defense, 1930) brings to mind King Alfin the Vague (the father of Charles the Beloved) and Alphina (the youngest of Judge Goldsworth's four daughters). King Alfin died in an airplane crash:
Alfin the Vague (1873-1918; regnal dates 1900-1918, but 1900-1919 in most biographical dictionaries, a fumble due to the coincident calendar change from Old Style to New) was given his cognomen by Amphitheatricus, a not unkindly writer of fugitive poetry in the liberal gazettes (who was also responsible for dubbing my capital Uranograd!). King Alfin's absent-mindedness knew no bounds. He was a wretched linguist, having at his disposal only a few phrases of French and Danish, but every time he had to make a speech to his subjects - to a group of gaping Zemblan yokels in some remote valley where he had crash-landed - some uncontrollable switch went into action in his mind, and he reverted to those phrases, flavoring them for topical sense with a little Latin. Most of the anecdotes relating to his naïve fits of abstraction are too silly and indecent to sully these pages; but one of them that I do not think especially funny induced such guffaws from Shade (and returned to me, via the Common Room, with such obscene accretions) that I feel inclined to give it here as a sample (and as a corrective). One summer before the first world war, when the emperor of a great foreign realm (I realize how few there are to choose from) was paying an extremely unusual and flattering visit to our little hard country, my father took him and a young Zemblan interpreter (whose sex I leave open) in a newly purchased custom-built car on a jaunt in the countryside. As usual, King Alfin traveled without a vestige of escort, and this, and his brisk driving, seemed to trouble his guest. On their way back, some twenty miles from Onhava, King Alfin decided to stop for repairs. While he tinkered with the motor, the emperor and the interpreter sought the shade of some pines by the highway, and only when King Alfin was back in Onhava, did he gradually realize from a reiteration of rather frantic questions that he had left somebody behind ("What emperor?" has remained his only memorable mot). Generally speaking, in respect of any of my contributions (or what I thought to be contributions) I repeatedly enjoined my poet to record them in writing, by all means, but not to spread them in idle speech; even poets, however, are human.
King Alfin's absent-mindedness was strangely combined with a passion for mechanical things, especially for flying apparatuses. In 1912, he managed to rise in an umbrella-like Fabre "hydroplane" and almost got drowned in the sea between Nitra and Indra. He smashed two Farmans, three Zemblan machines, and a beloved Santos Dumont Demoiselle. A very special monoplane, Blenda IV, was built for him in 1916 by his constant "aerial adjutant" Colonel Peter Gusev (later a pioneer parachutist and, at seventy, one of the greatest jumpers of all time), and this was his bird of doom. On the serene, and not too cold, December morning that the angels chose to net his mild pure soul, King Alfin was in the act of trying solo a tricky vertical loop that Prince Andrey Kachurin, the famous Russian stunter and War One hero, had shown him in Gatchina. Something went wrong, and the little Blenda was seen to go into an uncontrolled dive. Behind and above him, in a Caudron biplane, Colonel Gusev (by then Duke of Rahl) and the Queen snapped several pictures of what seemed at first a noble and graceful evolution but then turned into something else. At the last moment, King Alfin managed to straighten out his machine and was again master of gravity when, immediately afterwards, he flew smack into the scaffolding of a huge hotel which was being constructed in the middle of a coastal heath as if for the special purpose of standing in a king's way. This uncompleted and badly gutted building was ordered razed by Queen Blenda who had it replaced by a tasteless monument of granite surmounted by an improbable type of aircraft made of bronze. The glossy prints of the enlarged photographs depicting the entire catastrophe were discovered one day by eight-year-old Charles Xavier in the drawer of a secretary bookcase. In some of these ghastly pictures one could make out the shoulders and leathern casque of the strangely unconcerned aviator, and in the penultimate one of the series, just before the white-blurred shattering crash, one distinctly saw him raise one arm in triumph, and reassurance. The boy had hideous dreams after that but his mother never found out that he had seen those infernal records. (note to Line 71)
"Une étrange soirée avec Mlle Xavier at dix petites vieilles un peu ivres qui pleuraient leurs vingt ans..." is a newspaper article by Saint-Exupéry (who visited Moscow as a special correspondent for Paris-Soir in April-May 1935). A French writer and aviator (1900-1944), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry died on July 31, 1944, when his reconnaissance aircraft disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea near Marseille during a World War II mission. Ilya Ilf's coauthor, Evgeniy Petrov (born Katayev, 1902-1942) died in an airplane crash on July 2, 1942. Ilf's hobby was photography. Ilf and Petrov are the authors of Odnoetazhnaya Amerika (a travelogue translated into English as Little Goden America, 1937). The American Tragedy (1925) is a novel by Theodore Dreiser (an American writer, 1871-1945). Gusev (1890) is a story by Chekhov (a doctor and writer, 1860-1904, whom Shade lists among Russian humorists) set on a ship in the Indian Ocean.
Btw., al fin means in Spanish "finally," "at last," "in the end." According to Shade, he likes his name: "Shade, Ombre, almost "man" in Spanish." "Man" in Spanish is hombre. Tierre des hombres is the Spanish title of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry autobiographical book Terre des hommes (translated into English as Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939).